The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, January 17, 2014

NSA as Massa of the Global Sigint Plantation

Craig Murray caused quite a fuss in 2004 when, as UK ambassador
to Uzbekistan, he openly criticized the systemic and severe human rights abuses
of the Karimov regime.He was publicly
and pointedly stomped on by the British government, with the full encouragement
of the Bush administration, for complicating Western access to the Karshi-Khanabad
airbase and queering the Global War on Terror pitch.

Murray subsequently wrote an extremely interesting and
disarming memoir, Murder in Samarkand (published in the US as Dirty Diplomacy,
so I’ll throw in a link to Dirty Wars as well so readers can savor the full dirty spectrum).In his book, Murray discusses his extensive travels inside Uzbekistan, his contacts
with embattled activists, and what he saw and heard and said (and drank--see under index subject Craig
Murray—personal life—alcohol, pages 90-2, 93, 236, 250, 251, 253, 256, 263,
265, 272, 282, 290, and 315--and lusted after—see under the index subject Craig
Murray—personal life—women, attraction to, pages 18, 92, 118-19, 121, 128-9,
164-5, 250-1, 252, 253, 256, 263, 264-6, 268, 269, 305-6) in order to place in
context the determined efforts of the UK government to smear his reputation.

Uzbekistan presents an interesting conundrum for liberal
human rights activists, not because of its human rights violations, which are
undeniably ghastly, but because of its rather bizarre status as a private,
for-profit operation of the Karimov family and its allies.

Per my reading of Murray’s book, Uzbekistan looks like a
slice of the antebellum US South, and not just because of its total commitment
to the cotton culture that dominates the economy and lives of its people, and
has also dried up the Aral Sea and otherwise devastated the ecology of Central
Asia.There is so much money to be made
off dominating the state-controlled cotton industry (and mining out the
gigantic lump of gold that Uzbekistan is fortuitously perched upon) that there
is little incentive for Karimov to cultivate the diversified, urbanized market-driven
economy that nurtures feisty bourgeoisie and the contentious democratic forces
beloved by liberal reformers.

Plantation systems are bad for integrated economies and immiserated
citizenry, be they slaves in the South or Uzbeki citizens ordered into the
fields for the harvest, but they can be very profitable for plantation owners.The key point is to foreclose employment
alternatives and maintain access to an underpaid, immobile, and docile
workforce.That was certainly the
situation in the South, and not only in the pre-Civil War period.With property-rights conscious Northerners
unwilling to attack the foundations of the plantation system through
confiscation and redistribution of land to freemen to introduce competition
into the market in land and labor, the ability to enforce a local employment
monopoly was preserved and the captive-worker system immediately reconstituted
itself, first with the Black Codes—which explicitly tied freedmen to the
plantations through the implementation of restrictive labor contracts (and also
mandated fines for landowners seeking to lure workers away from their existing
employment with offers of higher wages)—and then the debt peonage of the
sharecropping system, which persisted well into the 20th century.

Unless the Karimov family is interested in encouraging a
revolutionary rumpus by aware, empowered, and aggrieved workers, I expect
similar conditions to obtain in Uzbekistan and the local oligarchy will display
little interest in market reforms or development of new economic sectors unless
their revenues can be safely and ferociously extracted.And with Karimov trampling on local
discontent quite ruthlessly and playing the “indispensable ally in battle
against Islamicist terrorists” card rather effectively, don’t look for a new
Lincoln to apply external pressure on behalf of the Uzbek masses.

Anyway, I was struck with a passage in Murray’s book in
which he speculates on the reason why the Blair government attacked him so
intemperately, and went to inordinate lengths to 86 his career.

Murray had complained that intel provided by the Uzbek
government through the CIA to the UK was tainted by the fact that it was
obtained through torture.Beyond the
fact that tortured detainees often provide false information in order to stop
their mistreatment, the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture
and, by the interpretation of Murray and others, was precluded from possessing (as
well as using in a court of law) evidence obtained under torture.

The UK government begged to differ, for reasons that might
have had little to do with the quality and morality of torture-extracted
intel.In 2006, Murray wrote:

I now believe that in protesting about intelligence obtained
by torture in Uzbekistan I had hit an even more sensitive point than I had
realized…I had also been hitting at the foundations of the UK-US intelligence
sharing agreement.This was put in place
by Churchill and Roosevelt, and under it the CIA and MI6 exchange everything,
as do the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK General Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ).As the US have four
times the volume of intelligence that we do, our intelligence services view
this agreement as of the highest importance and are particularly anxious that
there should be no derogation from the principle that everything should always
be shared…Therefore, if the CIA gets information from torture, we have to
accept it in order to maintain the integrity of the agreement and the principle
that everything is always shared…

Murray was, in Brit-speak, spot on concerning British
anxieties about the US relationship, as the Snowden trove confirmed.In August of last year, the Guardian printed
this account of GCHQ groveling to the NSA (undoubtedly amplified by the fact
that the NSA had underwritten over $100 million of GCHQ projects over the last
three years):

The leaked papers reveal that the UK's biggest fear is that
"US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access,
and/or reduction in investment … to the UK".

…

GCHQ seems desperate to please its
American benefactor and the NSA
does not hold back when it fails to get what it wants. On one project, GCHQ
feared if it failed to deliver it would "diminish NSA's confidence in
GCHQ's ability to meet minimum NSA requirements". Another document warned:
"The NSA ask is not static and retaining 'equability' will remain a
challenge for the near future."
…
The overriding necessity to keep on the right side of the US was revealed in
a UK government paper that set out the views of GCHQ in the wake of the 2010 strategic
defence and security review. The document was called: "GCHQ's
international alliances and partnerships: helping to maintain Britain's
standing and influence in the world." It said: "Our key partnership
is with the US. We need to keep this relationship healthy. The relationship
remains strong but is not sentimental. GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to
pull its weight."

Astonishingly, the document admitted that 60% of the UK's high-value
intelligence "is based on either NSA end-product or derived from NSA
collection". End product means official reports that are distillations of
the best raw intelligence.

One side of the story is the UK’s poodlicious commitment to
serving as the US intelligence community’s most eager and able overseas
partner.And the need to placate the US
and buttress Britain’s standing as a meaningful player in the world power game
goes a certain way to explaining why it would engage in a bizarre stunt like
yanking Glenn Greenwald’s partner into temporary custody in order to rummage
through his belongings while he was transiting London.

But I’m also struck by the implications for the senior
partner in the process, the United States.The intimidating character of US demands are best backed up if the US is
the indispensable superpower, the hegemon, if you will, in the global
intelligence space.If the UK is reliant
on US intel for the majority of its own intelligence product, that’s good for
the US in terms of the cooperation it can elicit from the UK on a broad range
of policy matters beyond intel sharing.

Massive surveillance isn’t just a question of catching the “bad
guys”.It’s also a question of getting
the “good guys” to do what we say.It’s
a matter of power, not just security.

If, on the other hand, it looks like international outrage
and public concern over the massive character of US data collection is going to
put a crimp into the NSA’s style, the US loses a valuable weapon in its arsenal—for
encouraging compliance by its state allies as well as adversaries.

And that’s why it is unsurprising that President Obama
hesitates to impose any meaningful restrictions on the NSA’s activities.The idea that the US “gets it all”—and friendly
governments are dependent upon the US for their own intelligence needs—is a useful
strategic asset.That’s a case that the
US security services have to make continuously, both in day to day clandestine
performance and in occasional hegemonistic chest-thumping in the public sphere.

Just as Karimov wants to maintain control over the cotton
business in Uzbekistan, President Obama wants to assert domination over the
Western world’s intel production—and convince the world it has no alternative
but to work on America’s digital plantation.

However, given the massive mission bloat, inefficiencies,
and risks inherent in a commitment to maintaining the “getting it all” monopoly,
it is an interesting and unanswerable question as to whether the genuine
security needs of other nations in particular and the world in general—and the
US itself--are well served under the system.